Salvador Dalí Trivia
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50 free Salvador Dalí trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Salvador Dalí trivia quiz covers the painter, the showman and the strange life in between. It starts in Figueres with the older brother whose name he inherited, the notary father who threw him out of the house, the Madrid student residence he shared with Lorca and Buñuel, the Sunday mornings in the Prado and the expulsion from the academy before his final exams. From there it takes in Un Chien Andalou, the arrival of Gala, The Persistence of Memory and its Camembert origins, the Surrealist 'trial', the London lecture delivered in a diving helmet, the Lobster Telephone and Mae West sofa, the meeting with Freud, the Time cover, the 'Avida Dollars' anagram, the escape from France in 1940, Spellbound and Destino, Nuclear Mysticism, the rhinoceros horn, the Chupa Chups logo, Franco, the castle at Púbol, the fire, the pacemaker, the crypt beneath his own museum and the 2017 exhumation. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. Try our Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel quizzes next.
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Q 01In which Catalan town was Salvador Dalí born in 1904?
Figueres
Figueres: as a teenager he showed early pictures in the town's theatre, and he later rebuilt its burnt-out shell as his own museum, where he now lies buried beneath the stage.
Q 02Dalí said his parents took him, aged five, to a grave and called him whose reincarnation?
His older brother
His older brother: the first Salvador had died nine months before the painter was born, and Dalí wrote that the two resembled each other 'like two drops of water'.
Q 03Which Spanish TV series dresses its gang in red jumpsuits and masks of Dalí's face?
Money Heist
Money Heist: creator Álex Pina said Dalí's face was chosen because it was the most iconic image Spain could offer and was almost pop culture already.
Q 04Which actor plays Dalí in the 2011 time-travel comedy Midnight in Paris?
Adrien Brody
Adrien Brody: when the film's time-travelling hero admits that he comes from the future, Dalí and his friends Man Ray and Luis Buñuel see nothing odd in it at all.
Q 05After Dalí's mother died in 1921, whom did his father marry?
Her sister
Her sister: Dalí, who called his mother's death 'the greatest blow I had experienced in my life', respected the aunt who became his stepmother, even as the rows with his father grew.
Q 06At the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, Dalí became close friends with Luis Buñuel and which poet?
Federico García Lorca
Federico García Lorca: the poet wrote an 'Ode to Salvador Dalí', and Dalí designed the sets when Lorca's play Mariana Pineda opened in 1927.
Q 07Which Madrid museum did the student Dalí visit every Sunday, calling it the world's best museum of old paintings?
The Prado
The Prado: he spent his Sunday mornings there 'pencil in hand', analysing the masterpieces one by one in what he called a monk-like period of solitary work.
Q 08When Dalí's body was exhumed in 2017, his moustache was intact, its tips still pointing to which clock time?
Ten past ten
Ten past ten: Narcís Bardalet, who had embalmed the painter in 1989 and came back for the exhumation 28 years later, called the upturned tips 'a miracle'.
Q 09What happened after Dalí told his 1926 examiners in Madrid that none of them was fit to judge him?
He was expelled
He was expelled: it was the second time the academy had thrown him out, after an earlier suspension on suspicion of stirring up a student protest.
Q 10On his first trip to Paris in April 1926, Dalí met which artist he revered?
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso: the 21-year-old called on his idol at his studio, and the canvases he painted over the next few years show the older Spaniard's influence.
Q 11Dalí's flamboyant later moustache was modelled on that of which 17th-century painter?
Diego Velázquez
Diego Velázquez: the old master's pictures made the strongest impression on the student Dalí in Madrid, and he went on measuring himself against him for the rest of his life.
Q 12Dalí's main contribution to Un Chien Andalou (1929) was what?
Helping Buñuel write the script
Helping Buñuel write the script: the two friends from student days in Madrid packed the film with dream images, from a razor drawn across an eye to grand pianos laden with dead donkeys.
Q 13When Dalí met Gala in 1929 she was married to which Surrealist poet?
Paul Éluard
Q 21Dalí delivered his lecture at the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition wearing what?
A deep-sea diving suit and helmet
A deep-sea diving suit and helmet: he began to suffocate inside it, and the young poet David Gascoyne had to free him with a spanner.
Q 22In December 1936, Dalí's face appeared on the cover of which American magazine?
Time
Time: he was 32, and the cover came as his paintings hung in the Museum of Modern Art's big New York survey of Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism.
Q 23Dalí's Lips Sofa for the English patron Edward James was modelled on the mouth of which Hollywood star?
Mae West
Paul Éluard: the poet brought Gala to Cadaqués that summer, and when he and the other guests went home she stayed behind with Dalí.
Q 14What final straw made Dalí's father throw him out of the family home in 1929?
A drawing insulting his mother
A drawing insulting his mother: eight years after her death he wrote across an outline of the Sacred Heart that he sometimes spat on her portrait for pleasure, and his enraged father banished him.
Q 15After the break with his father, Dalí and Gala made their home in a fisherman's hut where?
Port Lligat
Port Lligat: the hut stood on a bay beside Cadaqués, and over the decades he bought its neighbours and joined them into the rambling house that is now a museum.
Q 16Dalí said the melting watches in The Persistence of Memory came to him while contemplating what?
Camembert cheese
Camembert cheese: he called the limp dials 'the camembert of time', brushing aside the art historians who saw the theory of relativity in them.
Q 17In The Persistence of Memory, the one watch that isn't melting is swarming with what?
Ants
Ants: they cover the orange pocket watch at the lower left, the only one still hard, because Dalí used them as a sign of decay, as if metal could rot like flesh.
Q 18Dalí wrote that at six he wanted to be a cook, and at seven which historical figure?
Napoleon
Napoleon: 'and my ambition has been growing steadily ever since', he added in his 1942 autobiography, a boast he spent the rest of his career living up to.
Q 19Heiress Caresse Crosby, who threw Dalí a fancy-dress ball in New York, is credited with inventing what?
The brassiere
The brassiere: she patented it in 1914 under her maiden name, Mary Phelps Jacob, and decades later Dalí wrote much of his autobiography as a guest at her Virginia mansion.
Q 20In Philippe Halsman's 1948 photograph Dalí Atomicus, which animals fly through the air beside the leaping painter?
Cats
Cats: assistants threw three of them and a bucket of water across the studio on the photographer's count, and it took more than two dozen takes before Halsman was satisfied.
Mae West: Dalí had already painted her face as a Surrealist apartment, and James, the collector who supported him for two years, had the lips built as a real sofa.
Q 24Stefan Zweig introduced Dalí to which hero of his in London in 1938?
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud: the 82-year-old whispered 'That boy looks like a fanatic', to Dalí's delight, and told Zweig next day that the young Spaniard had changed his view of the Surrealists.
Q 25Dalí spent autumn 1938 painting at 'La Pausa', the Riviera home of which fashion designer?
Coco Chanel
Coco Chanel: his hostess became a collaborator the next year, when she worked with him on the costumes for his ballet Bacchanale.
Q 26Live models at Dalí's Dream of Venus pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair wore 'costumes' made of what?
Fresh seafood
Fresh seafood: the pavilion stood among the fair's amusements, and the fashion photographer Horst P. Horst was brought in to record the models in costume.
Q 27André Breton's mocking nickname for Dalí, 'Avida Dollars', is what kind of wordplay?
An anagram of Salvador Dalí
An anagram of Salvador Dalí: Breton meant it as a jibe at his money-making, but Dalí cheerfully admitted to a 'pure, vertical, mystical, gothic love of cash'.
Q 28Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the consul who defied orders to issue the Dalís' escape visas in Bordeaux in 1940, served which country?
Portugal
Portugal: Sousa Mendes signed thousands of visas against his government's orders, was recalled and forced into retirement, and was later honoured as Righteous Among the Nations.
Q 29Which writer published a scathing review of Dalí's 1942 autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí?
George Orwell
George Orwell: he granted that 'Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being', and insisted that a reader should hold both facts in mind at once.
Q 30Dalí designed the dream sequence for which 1945 Alfred Hitchcock film?
Spellbound
Spellbound: producer David O. Selznick found the sequence too long and complicated, so most of what was shot was cut and only about two minutes survive in the film.